I could discuss film & music piracy, the coming death of the traditional music, film & TV industries, newspaper paywalls, the lack of residual value with digital products etc. etc. etc.

I’m going to try and avoid that.

Suffice to say, people are used to getting things for free on the internet.

We are spoilt for choice these days.  Even having to register (for free) to use something is enough to put us off.  Being asked to cough up money for something is just unthinkable.  We’ll just look elsewhere.

Does this mean we are all cheapskates or pirates?  Does it mean we don’t believe people should be rewarded for their efforts, even if they benefit us personally??

I don’t believe so.

Anyway, back to the point…

I believe there is a need for a simple method of rewarding people for their efforts financially, and I believe a new “social micropayments” service called “flattr” could well be it.

The idea is simple.

If you provide a service or some content on the internet (I’ll henceforth refer to “content providers”) and want to allow people to reward you if they find it useful – you sign up with flattr.com and add a button to your website.

If you want to “donate” or “pay” (whatever you want to call it) money to a content provider you pay a flat fee (of your choosing) to flattr.com and, as you surf the web and find useful content you click on their flattr buttons.  flattr keeps track of whose buttons you have pressed over the course of a month and at the end of the month it divides up your account balance equally and gives it to the content providers you have rewarded.

ie. If you “load” £10 and click 10 buttons over the month, each content provider will receive £1.

This is the best method I have yet encountered that allows people to reward content providers financially and allows content providers to be rewarded.

I should mention, in order for a content provider to be able to receive money, they must also load money into their account and “flattr” other content providers themselves (this is the “social” part of the service).  Sounds fair enough I think.

Now, I don’t believe for a second this will stop skint teenagers from illegally downloading music, films & TV shows – they simply don’t have the money to spend anyway.

However, I do believe it provides a convenient method for people who have money and who *want* to reward content provider for providing them with something useful.

It’s a fantastic way of bridging the gap between charitable donations and traditional purchasing.

I could see myself using this to pay for user-supported internet radio, open source software, digital artwork, eBooks etc. etc.

flattr.com – watch this space.

Who needs a dodgy digital radio with its limited stations, poor sound quality and lousy battery life?  Not me, my PC is my radio.

Here are links to a bunch of my favourite internet radio stations.

This is a lot of people and I have no idea what they are looking for!

Are 35 million people just accidentally typing the word “computer” twice?  Or are they looking for something more specific to do with computing?

If you came across this page because you typed “computer computer” into a search engine – please help me figure out this mystery and let me know what you are searching for…!